Star Swarm Alpha

Star Swarm is the newest benchmark focusing on Oxide Games next generation Nitrous engine. Nitrous was designed for hardware found in modern PC’s, Playstation 4 and XBox One. Built on a 64-bit multicore engine, it will allow a high number of 3D objects to be drawn and rendered at the same time.

The benchmark has various settings, we will be using the Extreme setting and allowing it to run for 6 minutes. Due to Star Swarms random nature, each of the tests will be run three times, with the results averaged.

For Star Swarm, the Follow test shows negligible difference between the stock 260X and the CPU being overclocked. We do see a performance increase when the GPU is overclocked of 7.3%, and once again a small difference when both the CPU and GPU are overclocked receiving an 8.6% boost in performance.

While the Follow test did not show any impact when the CPU was overclocked, the Attract test did; a 10.4% boost. Overclocking both increased the numbers a little to a 12% performance boost, but it wasn’t compounded by the amount of when the GPU and CPU were overclocked individually.

Now we are back to seeing very little boost when the CPU is overclocked, but the GPU overclock makes a slight difference. Overclocking both the GPU and CPU resulted in a 9.5% performance boost.

The final test, follows the previous tests with the CPU and GPU overclocked getting a 6.9% performance boost. However, one slight difference the overclocking of the CPU actually lowered the average results for the SHMUP test. This was surprising, so I re-ran the test multiple times and still came out with a similar number.

Benchmark Results: As far as Star Swarm showed, overclocking the GPU provided a boost in performance, however overall overclocking the CPU did not provide a significant boost in performance.